Ottima analisi della forma musicale blues/jazz, che parte dalla distinzione tra i blue devil e il blues come musica e prosegue sgretolando una serie di luoghi comuni (sullo spirito della musica, sul ruolo della tecnica, sullo stile, sulla presunta ingenuità del folklore) che purtroppo animano la maggior parte delle riflessioni su queste musiche.
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Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues gets right at that sweet spot where mind & body meet, thinking head and dancing feet—the blend of sensuousness and contemplation that makes blues and jazz sound and feel right. Murray had an advantage over many writers, in that his background was in the black American South, from whence hails the music of which he speaks. Otis Ferguson wrote in 1939 that ‘authority in folk art demands the bred-in-the-bone understanding which neither takes it too solemnly nor falls for frivolity and fad,’ and he could have been thinking of Murray.

In Stomping the Blues, Murray writes of the communal sources and meaning of blues music and jazz, and how folk forms evolve into forms of art—functional, performative, consciously contrived. His writing is deliberately composed and pleasurably erudite, without the cover of modish theory or academic jargon. You may not agree with him, but you are glad that the man has his say. Murray begins by asserting that blues music (as distinct from the blues as a feeling of gloom and despair) is essentially dance music, and that the rhythm and release inherent in the music is an essential aspect of human existence.

…of all the age-old ways of dispelling the ominous atmosphere that comes along with the blues, the one most people seem to have found to be most effective all told also turns out to be essentially compatible with a great majority of the positive impulses, urges, drives, cravings, needs, desires, and hence the definitive purposes, goals and ideals of their existence. Nor should its identification come as a surprise to sufficiently attentive students of culture and civilization, and certainly not to students of the nature and function of aesthetics. The blues counteragent that is so much a part of many people’s equipment for living that they hardly ever think about it as such anymore is that artful and sometimes seemingly magical combination of idiomatic incantation and percussion that creates the dance-oriented good-time music also known as the blues.

Blues music—at once American and universal—is the cure for the blues. Black musicians developed the blues idiom by blending the incantation and percussion inherited from Africa with European elements encountered in the American context. Dance-hall-oriented instrumentalists began ‘ragging’ and ‘jazzing’ the breaks between blues choruses, extending, elaborating and refining their improvisations, and the result was a new music which came to be known as ‘jazz.’ Murray cites W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton as crucial transitional figures in the evolution of blues music from folk expression to something as richly complex as any art form. The natural setting for the music is the honky-tonk, dance halls, night clubs, variety shows, popular festivals and the like, where by custom and convention the percussive incantation gives rise to ‘bumping and bouncing, dragging and stomping, hopping and jumping, rocking and rolling, shaking and shouting.’ The symbolical and ceremonial aspects of honky-tonk and ballroom dancing—the down-home stomping good time that Murray calls the Saturday Night function—represents a ritual of purification and affirmation, fortified in its way by the interaction of musicians and dancers, performers and audience.

In that context of communal ritual, writes Murray, the musicians engage in a kind of contrived performance.

Blues musicians play music in the theatrical sense that actors stage a performance but also in the general sense of playing for recreation, as when participating in games of skill…they also play in the sense of gamboling, of fooling around with or having fun with. Sometimes they also improvise and in the process they elaborate, extend and refine…but what they do in all instances involves the technical skill, imagination, talent and eventually the taste that adds up to artifice…such is the overall nature of play, which is so often a form of reenactment to begin with, that sometimes it amounts to ritual…the effectiveness [of blues performance] depends on the mastery by one means or another of the fundamentals of the craft of music in general and a special sensitivity to the nuances of the idiom in particular.

Critics and commentators laud black musicians for their emotional expressiveness and their natural spontaneity, but Murray turns those notions on their head. The performance of blues-based music only seems spontaneous. To ‘play the blues’ is to proceed in terms of a very specific ‘technology of stylization,’ says Murray. Using the traditional twelve-bar chorus or stanza as the basis for improvisation requires ‘a special competence, more skill and taste than raw emotion, not natural impulse but the refinement of habit, custom and tradition that become second nature, the end product of discipline and training.’ The aesthetic technique and all the practice and rehearsals make the musical performance seems like a direct display of natural reflexes; the authenticity of any performance, however, depends not on the musician being true to his own private feelings, but on his idiomatic ease and consistency. Ultimately, writes Murray, ‘blues musicianship is more a matter of imitation and variation and counterstatement than of originality.’

Murray’s take on the idiomatic stylization of blues-based music has implications for jazz criticism. If, as Murray writes, ‘the most elementary obligation [of criticism] is to increase the accessibility of aesthetic presentation,’ then any valid critique must take into account the function of the music in the communal setting and the aesthetic technique of its performance. ‘To ignore the idiomatic roots [of the music] is to miss the essential nature of its statement, and art is nothing if not stylized statement; indeed, it is precisely the stylization that is the statement.’ Evaluation of the music is not a matter of the degree to which the music conforms to theories or formulas or rules imagined by the critic, but the consideration of how adequately it fulfills the requirements of the circumstances for which it was created. ‘Reviewers should presume to interpret and evaluate the work of blues musicians only when their familiarity with the special syntax of the blues convention is such that they are able to discern the relative emphasis each musician under consideration places on the definitive component of each idiom that is his actual frame of reference.’

The power of the music derives from the experience of the people who originated it, but the meaning of that experience has not always been well understood, says Murray.

Much is forever being made of the deleterious effects of slavery on the generations of black Americans that followed, but nothing at all is ever made of the possibility that the legacy left by the enslaved ancestors of blues-oriented contemporary U.S. Negroes includes a disposition to confront the most unpromising circumstances and make the most of what little there is to go on, regardless of the odds—and not without finding delight in the process or forgetting mortality at the height of ecstasy…it is the disposition to persevere that blues music at its best not only embodies but stylizes, extends, elaborates and refines into art. And such is the ambiguity of artistic statement that there is no need to choose between the personal implication and the social, except as the occasion requires.

And if the occasion calls for dancing, then everyone can join in.

Fun, passionate read. I will be excited to see this in a Library of America volume soon, I hope they are able to reproduce all the priceless pictures along with Murray's stomping text. ( )

Murray is easy to disagree with, and just plain wrong sometimes, but his love of this music and African-American culture of the 20s-50s is great enough, and contagious enough, to overwhelm my objections. ( )